CONNECTIONS; Too Hot To Handle, Too Hot to Not Handle

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: March 6, 2006

The polemics and outrage in the theatrical community last week after the New York Theater Workshop postponed its production of ''My Name Is Rachel Corrie'' might have been as intense as the uproar the company feared had it actually presented the play. The postponement of this one-woman drama about a 23-year-old pro-Palestinian American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in 2003 has been attacked as an act of censorship. One of the play's creators compared the decision to backing down in the face of a McCarthyite ''witch hunt.'' Hundreds have sent e-mail messages accusing the theater's directors of everything from cowardice to being ''Zionist pigs.''

Think of what might have happened had the theater actually presented the play later this month, fresh from its sold-out success at the Royal Court Theater in London. Then the controversy might have been over other forms of political blindness. There might have been assertions that the company was glorifying the mock-heroics of a naif who tried to block efforts to cut off terrorist weapon smuggling. Donors might have pulled away. And the New York Theater Workshop might have been accused of feeding the propagandistic maw of Hamas, just as it came into power in the Palestinian territories. Is it any wonder the company got jittery?

The surprise, though, is that there was so much surprise on the theater's part: surprise, first, that the play might cause controversy, then surprise that the postponement actually did.

That much should have been clear from other conflicts over artworks and images ranging from Andres Serrano's photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine to the Danish cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad. First, there is outrage, followed by either defense or retreat. Then there is much discussion of censorship and freedom of speech (which in many cases -- the cartoons aside -- is really more about public financing). And throughout, intermittent fear of giving offense mixes with frequent eagerness to give it; there is name calling and, occasionally, nervous back-pedaling.

Of course, there are some important distinctions in this case: the postponement was not in response to riots but to worry over what might happen to the theater's reputation or to donors' enthusiasm. The theater also suggested that the postponement was just that -- not a cancellation -- and that it was in response to sensitivities expressed by Jewish leaders and to the rawness of these issues given the electoral victory of Hamas; more planning, the theater said, would be needed to present the play in a broader context.

But what made it a more volatile act was that by declining for now to offend with the play, the theater violated the most sacred principles of our artistic temples.

Those principles are: Thou shalt offend, thou shalt test limits, thou shalt cause controversy. If there is an artistic orthodoxy in the West, it is that good art is iconoclastic and provocative, and that any pull back from this orthodoxy is cowardly and craven. In this distended context, the New York Theater Workshop's act was heretical.

How could this happen? How could a theater take on a play like ''Corrie'' and not know what it was getting into? How could it then postpone the production and not know that the outrage of its colleagues-at-arms would be as fervent as the imagined reaction of patrons and protestors?

To understand this a little better, consider the play itself. At first, it must have seemed a safe choice: safe with its aura of leftist frisson, and safe too in that its championing of a pro-Palestinian activist had become so mainstream that the London press hardly recognized anything was at issue. The play's political stance was treated as invisible, something its creators -- the actor Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner, an editor of the newspaper The Guardian -- seemed to desire. ''The play is not agitprop,'' Ms. Viner wrote last week in The Los Angeles Times. ''It's a complicated look at a woman who was neither a saint nor a traitor.''

And indeed, judging from the script -- edited from Corrie's e-mail, letters and journals -- Corrie's is an unusual voice, engrossing in its imaginative power, hinting at adolescent transformations and radicalization. ''My mother would never admit it,'' she says in the play, ''but she wanted me exactly how I turned out -- scattered and deviant and too loud.''

She names the people she would like ''to hang out with in eternity'': Rilke, Jesus, E. E. Cummings, Gertrude Stein, Zelda Fitzgerald and Charlie Chaplin. She announces to her accomplished older brother that instead of high salaries, she is ''steadfastly pursuing a track that guarantees I'll never get paid more than three Triscuits and some spinach.'' Midplay, she is a budding literary bohemian who suddenly finds herself on Gaza's front lines.

What could be less controversial than this heroine, with her Utopian yearning to end human suffering and her empathy for Palestinians living in a hellish war zone, their homes and lives at stake? Her death becomes a tragic consequence of her compassion and, apparently, in performance, has the power to spur tears.